Bible Teachings or Traditions of Men?

I think his point is that since he believes that God is righteous, he has no alternative but to believe that the horrifying accusations made against God in the OT are a filthy blasphemous slander.If I believed in the afterlife, I might speculate that some day you will have to account for going around telling everyone that God really is the evil stupid pig he's portrayed as in the OT.

If you agree with me, you have a funny way of showing it. I've never accused God of genocide, 'cos of not believing in his existence. The Bible does, however, as do you. The fact that you avoid using the word "genocide" while doing so is neither here nor there.

As I said, you avoid the word. Fine, let's use another word for it when God does it. Let's call it jenocide. I say that God didn't commit jenocide, 'cos of not existing. GDR says that God didn't commit jenocide, 'cos of him being good. You say that he did commit jenocide, 'cos someone wrote that he did, and your opinion of God's character is such that you find the accusation, unsupported though it is by a shred of evidence, perfectly plausible.I don't think he did it, GDR doesn't think he did it, you do think that he did it --- but then find him Not Guilty By Reason Of Divinity.

But jenocide isn't murder. I made up a completely new word just for you --- jenocide is an act which involves doing exactly the same things as one would if one was committing genocide, except that jenocide is morally OK, unlike genocide. Your God committed jenocide. Heaven forbid that I should say he committed genocide. He's jenocidal, not genocidal.It is your position that he committed jenocide, as defined. GDR and I think that he didn't. And both of us think he did nothing wrong. He, I and you all agree in exculpating him of any sin --- me because I don't think God exists, GDR because he thinks God is good and didn't commit the acts attributed to him by his anonymous accuser, and you because while agreeing that God did do what he's accused of, he was thereby committing jenocide rather than genocide.It's nice to see such unanimity of opinion, isn't it?

And bear in mind that people have gone the other way. What does that prove? I'd rather have dinner with Cardinal Newman than with you.

As far as I can find out, the Catholics outnumber all the disparate Protestant sects put together by at least 300,000,000 members. And that's including people like the Mormons. If we could put you all together and convince you to stop calling one another blasphemous heretics who will burn in Hell, you're still outnumbered.

But naturally this is the case. Since the West started off Catholic, naturally the emergence of Protestantism "led to a massive revolution in thought and culture". Similarly, since biologists started off creationist, the emergence of Darwinism "led to a massive revolution in thought and culture". You can hardly think that conclusive in its favor. Yeah, well, I'm not going to have dinner with you either. It's hypothetical.

But what you actually wrote was, and I quote: If this is not true, and it isn't, then you shouldn't have said it. But when you thought it was true, you wanted to shout from the rooftops how Protestants outnumbered Catholics. But now you know it isn't true, you say:

So having first decreed that only the people who agree with you are Christian, you can then proudly proclaim that the majority of Christians agree with you.

So, what are the essentials of Christian belief? Do they look anything like the Apostle's Creed?

Right. So first you decide what the essentials of Christianity are, then you decide that people who don't agree with that aren't really Christians, and then you proudly announce that a majority of Christians agree with you about essential things.To you, maybe "sola scriptura" is an essential of Christianity. But to many people, such as Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Congregationalists, the essentials of Christianity would look like this: Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

But if it was sinful, why did God tell Jehu that he'd "done well"?

No, Faith et al. are correct.The Bible makes it quite clear that Jesus existed from at least the beginning of time (see John 1), but not in the flesh. Then the "Word was made flesh". So his existence is not coincident with his existence in the flesh. Between the crucifixion and the resurrection, he went on existing, as the Bible makes clear in 1 Peter 3:18: "being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit". He still existed for that period, but was not incarnate. There can be no doubt about that from the scriptures, and you are just messing around with words to obscure what is quite clear to anyone who can be bothered to read the Bible.

Well, I did say "at least". John says: "In the beginning was the Word".It's not clear that the Bible authors had the same rather subtle concept of eternity that was developed by later theologians. I don't say they didn't, but I would be hard put to it to prove it from texts that I can recall right now.However, what we can take away from John 1 is that it definitely has Jesus existing though not being in the flesh. If he was alive before he was born in the flesh, there's no problem with him being dead in the flesh but alive in spirit, as 1 Peter says.

Quite so. However, later theologians (Augustine, etc) would think of God's eternity as consisting in him existing without time, which they considered one of his creations, rather than merely existing in time and at all times. Now, this might be the best way to make sense of the concept of an eternal God who created the universe at a particular time (time zero) but I don't think one would know it from the texts directly. This is the subtlety I was referring to. What we can get out of the texts is that at the very least Jesus existed (and will exist) for all time.